Let’s close this week of 1970s Los Angeles heritage with this quite interesting news segment focusing on the then newly out gay community of West Hollywood. ‘Two on the Town,” was a local Los Angeles series broadcast by KCBS-TV hosted by Steve Edwards and Connie Chung. In this 1980 piece, West Hollywood is profiled as the place where the gay community–for years hidden, whispered about but not seen–had now finally found an open acceptance (more or less). The segment is a period piece and it’s easy to mock or wince at the rather patronizing explanations of life in the West Hollywood ‘gay ghet ..read more

My last two posts have shown Los Angeles in the 1970s, a place enshrouded by smog and filled with traffic. Now lets go back thirty years earlier to the late 1940s and take a nice, slow, boring (but fascinating at the same time) drive around Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley. The camera is mounted on the front of a car which smoothly glides around the sparse, sunny, smogless and car-light area. The Valley was largely developed post World War 2–neighborhoods like this one were generally orange or walnut groves prior to the post-war building boom. My guess is that the footage was shot a ..read more

Apropos of Monday’s post featuring some fascinatingly mundane (yes I just jammed those two words together and did so on purpose) footage of L.A. in the 70s, here’s more of the same but with a tourists touch. We get some nice nasty Freeway shots, a little Sunset Strip, a tad of the Hollywood Bowl, a glance at the Century Plaza and a dose of the air quality which was atrocious at the time (instead of the merely lousy that it is now). Enjoy. Somehow the rancid, acrid, mephitic L.A. of fifty years ago (!) still is more enticing to me than the present day city of…ahem…angels. The post MORE SMO ..read more

At some point in 1973 the local Los Angeles television station KTLA (channel 5) sent a camera crew out to gather footage for a now forgotten news segment on gas prices. The crew returned with the above four plus minutes of dailies. Was it ever turned into an actual segment? Who knows? But the dailies somehow exist and make for mesmerizingly weird viewing. Watch period automobiles pull into gas stations, drivers open gas tanks and insert pumps, close-ups of gas prices and fuel gauges, various establishing shots of different gas stations and nice long-lens views of traffic. There’s no real or ..read more

Above is a ninety minute feature film made in 1920 called ‘The Flapper’, starring the then sensationally popular actress Olive Thomas. I can’t imagine anyone is actually going to watch the whole movie (I certainly didn’t) so why am I posting it? The film was shot on location in New York City and, in a fit of Cinema Verite, the filmmakers decided to shoot a scene in crowded midtown Manhattan. Skip ahead to 51 minutes and 20 seconds and you’ll find yourself on the top of a double decker bus–these were the regular Fifth Avenue buses of the era. You get some nice second floor views of the city ..read more

It’s not uncommon for yesteryears raciest things to be described in the current day as ‘tame’ or ‘now innocent’. But the 1920s had a lurid, highly sexually charged nature that was far ahead of its time, though it was soon to be quashed by much tamer subsequent decades. Nowhere is this on display more delightfully and raunchily than in the 1925 hit tune ‘Flamin’ Mamie’. The song, with music by bandleader Paul Whiteman and lyrics by a man named Fred Rose, reminds me of a mad word jam poem a la Joseph Moncure March’s ‘The Wild Party’. The rhymes are both intricate and hilarious, the fire image ..read more

Here’s a few minutes of grooving black and white footage shot from the rear of a car in Burbank, California in the late 1950s. We are in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, a dead-ass Valley strip near Warner Brothers filled with places called ‘The Tick Tock Lounge’, ‘The Kings Arms Steakhouse’ and an odd used clothing store called ‘Put-N-Take’ featuring ‘Stars and Socialites Apparel.’ The accompanying music choice is excellent– D.J Mad Mike’s monster hit “Slappin’ Rods and Leaky Oil” by the Savoys, 1959. By the way the date this was shot has been arrived at (not by me) by identifying a Corvair at ..read more

My family moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1969 when I was five years old. The house my parents bought was at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In terms of public schools this meant that I was able to go to schools either in Hollywood or Studio City (the Valley side). After a brief stint at Wonderland Ave. school in then hippie/rock-star/dope-smoking wilds of Laurel Canyon (on the Hollywood side) it was determined that it would be safer and saner for me to attend school on the Valley side. Thus I grew up in the dull and uneventful suburbs of Los Angeles, rather than i ..read more

A few days ago I posted a video of Vincente Minnelli’s abandoned mansion in Beverly Hills. It’s a fascinating and acrid experience to witness the shards of a once worldly and elegant existence. So lets close the week with a more sophisticated and Minelli-esque moment and bring the man back the dignity that the house and its fate robbed him of. Here he is winning the Oscar in 1958 for ‘Gigi’. Minnelli graciously accepts the award, taking the opportunity to stick his finger in his eye for a good ten seconds (a nervous tic perhaps?) and then gives a nice, quick acceptance speech. No other nomi ..read more

Before you read any further let me quickly give you fair warning that the above posted videos are a complete and total waste of time, lacking in anything remotely akin to cultural interest, intellectual rigor or even pop-culture delight. Still, I find the mid-show plugs that aired in the middle of ‘Tattletales’, a 1970s afternoon game show hosted by Bert Convy, so relentlessly worthless that I’ve been enjoying watching them for the past half hour or so. The products (forgotten alarm clocks, astro turf welcome mats, ‘Stay Puf’ fabric softener, cheap chocolate and Franco American sauce) are ..read more